"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Partisanship can make you blind to reality. Because I am a conservative and generally support Republicans, it would be easy for me to ignore any faults with the tax reform bill the GOP-controlled Senate passed over the weekend. Yet I am skeptical enough to believe that, as a matter of economic policy, the bill is neither (a) the brilliant Reaganesque triumph its supporters claim, nor (b) the unmitigated disaster its Democrat opponents claim. Probably both sides are mistaken to some degree. My hunch is that the tax bill is overall a good thing, just not as good as the GOP would have us believe. This is only a hunch, however, because I don’t bother getting down into the messy mathematical details of a mere legislative proposal; what the Senate passed will not be the actual law, as the House has yet to pass its own bill, and the two versions of tax reform must be reconciled before anything can be enacted as law.

This sort of common-sense attitude toward public policy is non-existent on the Left. They’ve gone into a full-on panic over this bill, denouncing it in hysterical terms. On Friday, Alyssa Milano tweeted a link to C-SPAN coverage of the Senate debate on the tax bill, and one of her followers went ballistic over a statement by South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott:

watching…..Senator Tim Scott “$100 a month is real money” to struggling families ? Is he F**KING kidding ? HOW MUCH does $100 buy in this day ? Costs me $50 to fill my f**king gas tank FFS

Peltier, incidentally, is a New England native who graduated from prestigious Pomona College ($67,225 a year for tuition, room and board) whereas Tim Scott graduated from a Baptist school, Charleston Southern University ($34,740 a year). Peltier challenging Scott’s qualifications to speak about the economic reality of poverty? Not smart:

The reality is this: Low-income families already pay zero federal income taxes, and the $100 a month they’ll get through the GOP Senate plan comes from an increase in existing tax credits, which are in effect an income subsidy from the government. So the Republicans are literally proposing that taxpayers give $1,200 a year to poor families, and Democrats are denouncing this free-money-for-the-poor plan. Why?

Because the GOP also wants to lower taxes on corporations — necessary because U.S. businesses currently pay higher corporate tax rates than their foreign competitors — and Democrats are agaInst anything that is good for businesses. Corporations are bad, according to Democrats who oppose any policy that would stimulate private-sector economic growth. Liberals always assume they are best qualified to decide what’s good for poor people, without regard to actual facts.

Ronald Reagan, who knew hard times growing up in small-town Illinois, once said: “I believe the best possible social program is a job.” Reagan also observed that liberal economic ideas are rooted in a misguided attitude that incites envy of the rich: “We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.”

Liberals are devoted to a concept of “equality” that leads them to believe that the best way to help the poor is by punishing the rich. The great irony is that so many liberals are quite rich themselves, while many conservatives — Tim Scott among them — are more directly familiar with poverty, and reject the attitude of self-pitying helplessness that is the basis of the Democrat Party’s economics of envy.

Of course, liberals consider themselves to have a monopoly on “caring”: